Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Looking For an Easy Way To Contribute To Eclipse?

Are you an Eclipse user who is looking for an opportunity to get more involved, to contribute something back? Maybe you've considered reporting bugs (or even done so, but not consistently). Or maybe you've even thought about trying to implement a feature or fix a bug with a code patch, but were intimidated by the huge code base and/or ignorant of how to get started with that.Well, if you happen to also be a Windows 64-bit user there is an excellent specific opportunity for you to get involved. The next major Eclipse release, code named Helios and based on version 3.6 of the platform, is considering offering 64-bit Windows versions of all the EPP packages*. But they need commitment from people who can test and report bugs with the Win64 builds; the team is small and given all the combinations of packages (there are now 9, maybe more by the time Helios is released) and supported platforms (there are currently 6, Win64 would be number 7), it's a daunting task to verify that each one is working correctly. But here is where you can help; if you are on 64-bit Windows you can offer to test the milestone builds of such a package and report bugs if you find them.This is a low-barrier-to-entry way to contribute real value to Eclipse, by doing something (using Eclipse) that you already do. Plus, you'll get early access to all of the new features, enhancements, and bug fixes that the 3.6 release is bringing!So, go ahead and comment on Bug 293969 and add your pledge to help test - I'm sure the EPP team would be thrilled to have the help.